Head teacher Christine Holbrey shares plans for Canon Lee School

THE pace of change at York’s Canon Lee School has been palpable in the past year, says its head teacher.

Christine Holbrey took over at the school, which has about 700 pupils, at the beginning of the autumn term in 2012 and says she hasn’t looked back.

She said: “I think we are moving the school on rapidly, both in terms of changing personnel and personalities and raising expectations across the board both of students and staff.

“There has been a focus on improving the quality of teaching across the school so that we will be able to resecure the “good” grade at our next Ofsted inspection, which is something that it is now more difficult to achieve because of changes in the system, and from there we will get to the top grade of outstanding.”

To that end Miss Holbrey said the school’s GCSE results speak for themselves – with 65 per cent of pupils getting an A*– C grade, including English and maths, they ranked fourth in terms of schools in the city and Canon Lee was the second state school behind Fulford. The results made it the fastest-improving school in York.

This year, Miss Holbrey said she was confident that those results would be maintained or bettered.

She said: “I brought a leadership consultant into the school and have developed a partnership with Fulford School, who are an outstanding school. We are looking three or four years ahead to move us on to that next stage of outstanding.”

Miss Holbrey has worked as a teacher for more than 23 years and was previously deputy head at York High School and before that, acting head teacher at Lowfield School, overseeing the school’s move to the old Oaklands site where the two schools merged.

She said at Canon Lee she has appointed two new deputy heads who start in September, Frances Johnston who currently teaches at Holy Family, Keighley, as assistant head and Ben Wilson who is coming from the Endeavour Academy, in Hull.